The theatre director Richard Eyre, who was a Governor of the BBC for eight years until 2003, writes about the Gilligan saga in the Guardian.

He sees it in Shakespearean terms:  "the martyrs were Dyke and the poor, hapless David Kelly, the villains were the government and Gilligan, and the fools were the board of governors".

Text of his piece follows:


In the long run, Alastair Campbell may be seen as the man who brought down Blair. His fixation with picking a fight with the BBC has grotesquely magnified the status of the 45-minute claim, which has been subjected to minute scrutiny and exposed as no less flawed than the BBC's notorious "mostly true" 6.07am report: a claim based on a single, unreliable source.

Which, of course, is the premise of a large number of newspaper stories: run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it. Two sources? A rumour will do. A correction? Forget it. Trying to extract an apology from a newspaper is as difficult as taking a leg of an okapi from a starving lion - as I discovered last year when I was libelled by a broadsheet newspaper that constantly celebrates its independence. From truth, perhaps.

And yes, the BBC does have to do better than that. It does have to be capable of demonstrating its scrupulousness, and reporters do have to keep proper notes. How else to they expect their version of events to be confirmed when they are challenged? By bleating: "Trust me, I'm a journalist?" John Birt was right to describe the Gilligan affair as the result of "slipshod" journalism, even if his remarks were tinged by a whiff of schadenfreude and shadowed by the subtext "it would never havehappened in my day". And was he, subconsciously of course, influenced by his desire to see Mark Byford, for whom he had so conspicuously lobbied at the time of Greg Dyke's appointment, as director general?

Lest I seem to be Birt-bashing, I should say that I admire what Birt did for the BBC even if I often disagreed with his manner of doing it, or - as his much-loved consultants would put it - his "management style". First, he made the BBC - and the public - recognise that receiving the licence fee meant a responsibility to all the licence-payers, many of whom felt thoroughly disenfranchised from the existing BBC. Second, however ill-conceived in execution, he insisted that programme-makers were made (or allowed) to be responsible for their own budgets. Third, with great prescience, he established the BBC's online and digital strategy. And fourth, he initiated a strong, coherent news-gathering and news broadcasting strategy, which, in spite of its sporadic sloppiness and superficiality, still maintains standards that any newspaper would be proud to aspire to. Recurrent factual inaccuracies - often disguised as "opinion" in print journalism - are rare in BBC news reporting.

What Birt failed to do was to change the culture of the BBC without threatening its heartland - that desire to share a sense of common purpose and community. I am not being "touchy-feely" here: all organisations - newspapers, churches, schools, hospitals, theatres, businesses, even governments - are nourished by unquantifiable things like morale and self-esteem. Within that heartland at the BBC resides a faith that it is still possible to make a TV programme for no other reason than the shared belief that it is worth making for itself alone rather than as a commodity or a token in the ratings game.

Birt gave the impression (a false one, I think) that he cared more for process than product. Dyke reversed that polarity. "It's the programmes, stupid," was his opening sally to his staff. He recognised that the BBC is nothing more or less than the sum of the excellence of its programmes, and in order to guarantee that he needed to cultivate, nurture, support and encourage the people who made those programmes. His "Making It Happen" initiative has been much mocked by those ignorant of the ecologies of large organisations and sentimental about the rigid command structure of the "old" BBC. The effect of the initiative (achieved without consultants) has been to put an emphasis on taking responsibility, on dispelling bureaucracy, and on becoming part of an organisation whose aim is to be creative. In short, to make better programmes. And while I could cite many programmes that fail to pass the test expected of a great public broadcaster, I could cite many more in all categories that triumphantly make the case for the continuing licence fee.

Dyke will be much, and justly, mourned at the BBC, but when he is travelling down one side of the country on the promotional tour for his autobiography as Campbell travels up the other side promoting his, he will have ample opportunity to reflect how closely their destinies were linked - the one the other's doppelgänger. Both are (or, in Greg's case, were) fervent supporters of the New Labour "project". They are both university educated, sport-loving men, contemptuous of middle-class convention. Both are charming, entertaining, intelligent, and passionately loyal to their organisations. Both are impetuous, combative and stubborn, and when Dyke recognised that the "mostly true" broadcast was a mistake, his stance was a mirror of Campbell's bare-knuckle prizefighter.

Campbell bullied and taunted the BBC for months during the Iraq war: letter after letter, email after email, phone call after phone call of provocative, disingenuous, belligerent, abusive and unfounded accusations of coordinated and systemic bias against the government. If there is one thing that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, it's that the BBC was innocent of these charges. Indeed, a study from Cardiff University has shown the opposite: that of all news gathering organisations, the BBC was the most consistently pro-war. And if there's another thing that the events of the past eight months have shown, it's that the BBC's news department is far from coordinated: nation may speak peace unto nation, but you'll never get the Today programme to cooperate with Newsnight.

There was one fatal distinction between Dyke and Campbell - a curious folly with which Gavyn Davies colluded. While he and Dyke mirrored the posture of Campbell, they didn't mimic his rationale. Was it naivety or principled behaviour that prevented them from acting on the precept that is etched on the soul of every politician and apparatchik? You do whatever you have to do to stay in office. Which means: you dissemble, you deceive, you even apologise, however much you resent being bullied by people you might earlier have counted as your friends. In short, Dyke ignored King Lear's advice: "Get thee glass eyes,/ And like a scurvy politician seem/ To see the things thou dost not."

The Church of England used to be known as the Tory party at prayer; the BBC is said to be the Guardian on the airwaves. It's true that it is inherently a liberal institution - in the sense that its aims are indivisible from a sense of liberal emancipation. And it's true that the demographic of its staff probably mirrors that of New Labour's supporters. But I don't think that there is endemic bias in the BBC except the bias of those who believe, regardless of their political philosophies, that they are a part of a worthwhile enterprise whose sum is greater than its parts.

There's a corollary to these beliefs, and that is the obligation to bear in mind that while it's the job of BBC journalists to seek out good stories, there's a special burden of responsibility in reporting them. And the same goes for the barely concealed contempt for politicians which, while being occasionally richly deserved, can't be allowed to become a recurrent tic. If the BBC is, broadly speaking, unbiased or uncorrupted by competition, it's not uninfected by the pandemic of the tabloidisation of the British media. Every political battle, accident, crime, triumph or disaster is now treated like an incident in a soap opera; the country has been "Dianified", peopled by cartoon-like martyrs, villains and fools.

In the BBC affair, the martyrs were Dyke and the poor, hapless David Kelly, the villains were the government and Gilligan, and the fools were the board of governors. The truth, if that's not a word to be used with caution, is that there's a little of each category in all of the protagonists - and I speak as an ex-governor of the BBC who had the good luck to leave the board in May last year.

Many commentators speak wistfully of a desire to return to a BBC that would dispense high culture and scorn its ratings. This Reithean Land of Oz, if it ever existed, vaporised with the coming of time-shift recording, satellite broadcasting and the internet. Today's BBC has an obligation to look after the interests of the majority of its licence-payers just as much as the small, highly educated, culturally literate elite, and as long as it does so it will be necessary to try to square the circle of popularity and high-mindedness. There will continue to be mistakes made, but if all this is done in good faith, the licence fee will be justified.

As Will Hutton has observed, as a tactician Campbell was a genius, but as a strategist he was a fool. Of Dyke you might say the reverse: his strategy, perhaps unwittingly, will preserve the independence of the BBC. This government - no more (or less) callow, philistine, unprincipled and opportunistic than any other of the past 25 years - will be cautious about dismantling the BBC after its independence has been made such a matter of public examination.

But in the charter renewal it's possible that a confederacy of interests - the government, the Murdoch press, rival broadcasters - might conspire to shrink the BBC into a British version of America's PBS. While that would succeed in drawing the teeth of BBC news, it would do a murderous disservice to the country's most important cultural organisation. Politicians consider that news constitutes the heart of the BBC; so, perhaps, do many journalists. They are wrong: news is a significant part of the BBC's anatomy, but it's not its heart. Its heart is the drama, documentary, entertainment, history, science, nature, arts and leisure programmes, and it's in these areas that the BBC has made its case as a public broadcaster in the only convincing and effective way available to it - by making programmes that couldn't or wouldn't be made by any other British broadcaster.

Like other cultural organisations - the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Tate, the British Museum, the National Theatre - the BBC is among the few institutions in Britain that actually achieves what it's supposed to, and if the government allows its obsession with one small (though significant) area of one division of the BBC's output to poison its attitude to the remainder, it will not be forgiven by history.

Could the words of John Ruskin be etched on each red despatch box? "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the other two, but of these three, the only trustworthy one is the last."